A clearer picture of Bench’s downfall is emerging thanks to newly released bankruptcy filings. The records show that the Canada-based startup, which ironically enough offered cloud accounting software for small businesses, consistently struggled to reach profitability. It burned through $135 million from its founding in 2012 to September 2024. By the time of its collapse,
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Sonos announced that it has laid off 200 people in a letter posted to its site Wednesday. The news follows a 100-person layoff in August. Both rounds arrive in the wake of a disastrously botched update to the Sonos app that alienated broad swaths of the premium audio hardware firm’s extremely loyal fanbase. The new
Attorneys for Elon Musk intend to move to dismiss a case that accuses the Tesla CEO, who is also the head of President Donald Trump’s DOGE organization, of using AI-generated, copyright-violating “Blade Runner”-inspired images at a Tesla press event. In a filing submitted to the U.S. District Court Central District of California, Western Division late
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Founders and investors, it’s time! TechCrunch Early Stage has evolved into TechCrunch All Stage 2025, returning to Boston on July 17. Get your tickets now and save up to $310 on select ticket types, securing your spot at the best rates. Register here for your All Stage ticket at unbeatable prices. All Stage covers all
Jen Keane’s claim to fame is that she grew a shoe using bacteria, coaxing the microbes to deposit their nanocellulosic materials in the shape of a sneaker. But she’s kind of over that. “I feel like that sort of misses the point,” she told TechCrunch. “The fiber produced by bacteria — like, that’s not a
Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance have demoed a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date. Deepfaking AI is a commodity. There’s no shortage of apps that can insert someone into a photo, or make a person appear to say something they didn’t actually say. But most deepfakes
The fashion industry has concerned Emily Gittins since adolescence. The sector is, after all, one of the most polluting in the world. According to some sources, it is responsible for nearly 10% of the earth’s CO2 emissions and more than 20% of all water waste. Yet people still want more, fast. “The way we consume
In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the summit, early-stage VC firm Galion.exe, growth investment
DSTLRY, a venture-backed digital comic books marketplace, on Tuesday added a pair of features designed to bring customization to the platform. The first feature, dubbed Commissioned Digital Remarques, allows creators to add personalized sketches and signatures to digital comics. The second, Unlimited Digital Covers, expands platform-wide access to alternative comic book covers. Commissioned Digital Remarques
An estimated 20% to 30% of all inventory in the U.S. is surplus, with much of it ending up in landfills. A startup called Sotira wants to help address this problem: It leverages AI to help companies offload and monetize their surplus inventory. Sotira partners with brands to offload millions of pounds of surplus grocery,
On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected. He’d just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could do. But when they
September 11 left a lasting impression on Stephen Beaton, and like many others of his generation, he joined the military. But at the U.S. Air Force Academy, his journey took a bit of a turn. There, his chemistry studies deepened his interest in liquid fuels. “As a product of September 11, seeing the spike in
Chris Anderson, who has run TED for 25 years, is looking to bestow the operation on anyone who has a good plan for its future, he announced in a blog post. TED is best known for its TED Talks, where ideas from tech to humor have been explored. It has featured famed tech moguls (Bill
Swiss startup LogicStar is bent on joining the AI agent game. The summer 2024-founded startup has bagged $3 million in pre-seed funding to bring tools to the developer market that can do autonomous maintenance of software applications, rather than the more typical AI agent use-case of code co-development. LogicStar CEO and co-founder Boris Paskalev (pictured
Fintech-turned-HR outfit Deel is trying to lay the groundwork for an IPO. On Tuesday, it said its annual revenue run rate climbed to $800 million in 2024 after growing by 70%. The startup, which helps businesses globally hire, manage and pay employees remotely, also said it has sold $300 million in secondary shares to General
Renewables notched another win as Amazon signed contracts to buy 476 megawatts of wind and solar on the Iberian Peninsula. The power purchase agreements with multinational utility Iberdrola should help Amazon feed new data centers it has planned in the region. Last May, the company said it would invest $17 billion in infrastructure projects, including
Tabular data is a broad term that encompasses structured data that generally fits into a specific row and column. It can be a SQL database, a spreadsheet, a .CSV file, etc. While there has been tremendous progress on artificial intelligence applied to unstructured and sequential data, these large language models are fuzzy by design. They
Self-driving truck startup Waabi is partnering with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks, an important milestone as it gets closer to a commercial launch. The tie up also marks Volvo’s second partnership to co-develop self-driving big rigs with a startup partner. In May 2024, Volvo teamed up with Aurora Innovation to
It’s never been easier to create and publish art than it is now, and if you believe the companies building tech around AI, the production process is going to get even more efficient. That’s especially the case with video production, with companies of all sizes using large language models to build tools that let you
Asya Bradley, a former fintech founder and investor, has joined payments giant Stripe as its new head of Startup & Venture Capital Partnerships. Bradley announced the news on February 2 in a post on LinkedIn, though her bio shows that she joined Stripe back in November. Neither Stripe nor Bradley were immediately available for comment.
Last Friday, AI startup OpenAI filed a new application to trademark products associated with its brand — “OpenAI” — with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Normally, this wouldn’t be newsworthy. Companies file for trademarks all the time. But in the application, OpenAI hints at new product lines both nearer-term and of a more
The Beatles’ AI-assisted track “Now and Then” won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance on Sunday night, marking the first time that a song of its kind has taken home the award. No, Paul McCartney did not use AI to create some creepy LennonGPT bot. Instead, he used noise reduction systems to clean up a
French startup Riot has raised a $30 million Series B round after reaching $10 million in annual revenue in 2024. Originally focused on educating employees about cybersecurity risks, the company now wants to go one step further and nudge employees so that they minimize their attack surface. Left Lane Capital is leading today’s round with
Missed the 2-for-1 deal for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025? No problem! Super Early Bird prices are still available, with savings of up to $1,130 on individual tickets and up to 30% on group passes. These savings are only good until the end of this month. Celebrate 20 years of TechCrunch Disrupt from October 27-29 at Moscone
OpenAI is announcing a new AI “agent” designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform. Appropriately enough, it’s called deep research. OpenAI said in a blog post published Sunday that these this new capability was designed for “people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science,
Google’s X “moonshot factory” this week announced its latest graduate. Heritable Agriculture is a data- and machine learning-driven startup aiming to improve how crops are grown. As the firm noted in an announcement post published Tuesday, plants are incredibly efficient and impressive systems. “Plants are solar powered, carbon negative, self-assembling machines that feed on sunlight
Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur. But what about scaling that one-person business into something meatier
DeepSeek is making waves in the AI world, grabbing headlines and taking over the app stores, even beating out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But what’s really happening behind the hype? Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Max Zeff is talking about it all with Ion Stoica, Professor of Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and the cofounder and
When accounting startup Bench abruptly failed last month, the shutdown was forced when the company’s lenders called in the startup’s loan. In late 2023, the digital freight company Convoy faced financial challenges, leading venture lending firm Hercules Capital to assume control of the company to recover its investments. Divvy Homes, which sold for about $1
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